Thursday, October 3, 2013

New York City - Above the Fish Market

We stayed in Chinatown this year. During most of my trips to New York, I've stayed in Midtown (all those trips with Midori to the Doubletree in Times Square [saw Mike Wallace in the lobby once and another time in the late 90s, we shared the hotel with the Backstreet Boys, which meant we had to pass a gauntlet of screaming girls every day]); and there was the apartment next to Penn Station which Peter and I rented from a random girl on craigslist (we didn't trash her apartment and she didn't come back and kill us, but still, two reasons maybe you don't book accommodations from random people on craigslist). Other places have been close to Midtown (my apartment last year was in Hell's Kitchen which is mid and a bit west), but I've also stayed downtown a few times (Elizabeth's tiny place in the Village [one minuscule window which faced an alley, hence that apartment got NO natural light, and the kitchen was, with no exaggeration, the size of my downstairs powder-room]). There was Jesús and Eric's place on Bank Street [lovely], and the place in the Bowery where Peter, Jenine and I stayed in 2011 (weird, old, again, no light), and of course Brooklyn a few times (Dave and Annabelle's apartment which was cute enough, even though the floors were slanted; and then there was the place Elizabeth moved to in Brooklyn, which had two-story, floor-to-ceiling windows which let in so much sun, you could have grown produce). But this was the first time in Chinatown. And it was right IN Chinatown, above a fish market, the odors from which thankfully did not reach the sixth floor (although they might have if the windows had been open, which they weren't, because it was ridiculously warm for October and we had the air conditioners on the whole time).